All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

USE WITH CAUTION: perminately delete old kernel packages

generate a unique and secure password for every website that you login to
usage: sitepass MaStErPaSsWoRd example.com description: An admittedly excessive amount of hashing, but this will give you a pretty secure password, It also eliminates repeated characters and deletes itself from your command history. tr '!-~' 'P-~!-O' # this bit is rot47, kinda like rot13 but more nerdy rev # this avoids the first few bytes of gzip payload, and the magic bytes.

Execute a command with a timeout
In this example the command "somecommand" will be executed and sent a SIGALARM signal if it runs for more than 10 seconds. It uses the perl alarm function. It's not 100% accurate on timing, but close enough. I found this really useful when executing scripts and commands that I knew might hang E.g. ones that connect to services that might not be running. Importantly this can be used within a sequential script. The command will not release control until either the command completes or the timeout is hit.

Monitor cpu freq and temperature
This is maybe helpfull from system overheat on your linux box

How To Get the Apache Document Root

view the system memory in clear text
see what's in your memory right now... sometimes you find passwords, account numbers and url's that were recently used. Anyone have a safe command to clear the memory without rebooting?

Create multiple mp4 files using avidemux
Convert multiple files using avidemux. Version updated (thanks to the guys who helped me giving me hints about how to improve the command). Works with files whose name contains blank characters. One of the reasons why I love open source: everyone can take something "done" and improve it to make it better! If u have suggestions, please let me know.

See where a shortened url takes you before click

Restore deleted file from GIT repository
This command will automatically find the latest version of the file that was deleted and restore it to it's previous location. If, of course, your file was kept in a git repository... I found this command on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1113140

yes > /dev/null
your laptop can be a good heater :)


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: